Advantages
Tall Advantages - The Advantages of Being Tall
Taller equals longer reach
It's a miracle, I can see...
In a seated or more so a standing environment, when viewing an event, being head and shoulders above your surrounding audience is a distinct advantage. When hundreds are around that eighteenth green at Augusta, waiting with anticipation to see if Tiger Woods and his trusty Ping putter can hole that 4 foot putt for another golfing major victory - you can see over the heads of those folks 5 deep in front of you. Meanwhile the poor average sized guy behind you....well he'd need to balance on his golf bag to get a glimpse of the action !
Tall, dark and handsome
The preference for taller men extends, it seems, beyond the boardroom and into the bedroom. Steve Penner, the previous owner of a Boston-based dating service, says he heard it all the time. "It is common for many women to insist that any man they date must be "at least" four to six inches taller," he says. And the reason may be genetic. Experts like James Gould from Princeton University believe that women's preference for tall men is hard-wired into the brain, and it's there because it relates to good health. "When height is an indicator of health, this is not surprising, and if females are programmed to look for health, they would end up with taller males," Gould says. "It's entirely plausible this is true." And a study published in the journal Nature seems to back up this theory. Robin I. M. Dunbar of the University of Liverpool and colleagues studied 3,200 men in their 20s to 50s, whose average height was 5'6." They found:
Taller men are more likely to be married and have children than shorter men. Childless bachelors are significantly shorter than married men. Those with children were, on average, 1.2 inches taller than childless men. Married men were an average of 1 inch taller than bachelor
Tall equals more dollars
Gladwell polled about half of the Fortune 500 companies and found that the majority of their CEOs were tall, white men, and:
The average CEO was just under 6 feet (the average American man is 5'9")
Among the CEOs, 58 percent were 6 feet or over
In the United States, 14.5 percent of men are 6 feet or over
Some 30 percent of the CEOs were 6'2" or taller
Only 3.9 percent of U.S. men are 6'2" or taller
"Height matters for career success," said Timothy Judge, a University of Florida management professor who co-conducted a study on the topic.
After analyzing the results of four large-scale studies, Judge and co-author Daniel Cable, a business professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill, found that extra inches could add up to thousands of dollars.
For each inch in height, a person earned about $789 more in pay. So a 6-foot person would earn $5,525 more each year than someone who is 5'5."
"If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys," Judge said.